Initial Results From My Amazon FBA Business

This is my first post about my Amazon FBA business. I switched the business model from what I was doing when I was working from home. Now that I’ve been traveling for a while, I wanted to share my initial results. There is a lot of misinformation out there, but I’ve found traveling and running an Amazon business has been fun and rewarding all at the same time.

Learning FBA

It’s been almost 2 years since I sold my bookselling business and somehow I ended up with another Amazon business. Before you think I’m mental (I am! 😜), let me explain. I was tired of corporate America and the nine to five grind. So I set off to travel the world and start an online business. I initially had a different plan altogether than an Amazon FBA business, but that’s a story for another time. I decided to research different online businesses that would allow me to travel and work from anywhere, a term coined Digital Nomad is now the common vernacular for this. When researching different Digital Nomad businesses that would be a good fit for me, and I researched pretty much everything you can do for remote work, obviously e-commerce caught my attention again.

When I decided to look further into FBA and what it was, I came across several books, articles, webinars, podcasts, and a general web of information that just made me dizzy. I’d say about 80 percent of it was just a bunch of digital marketers trying to sell me a product that offered little to no value. I kept digging for more information for weeks and weeks trying to find some sort of golden nugget that would help me get organized. I really wanted to get the ball rolling.

Starting My Amazon FBA Business

Somewhere around mid-August, I found a podcast that explained a business model using all 4 of the lessons I’d learned from my merchant fulfilled bookselling business and it totally made sense to me. I started an Amazon FBA business that allowed me to stick to my buying criteria using online tools and outsourcing some very time-consuming tasks. This is commonly referred to as Online Arbitrage. I started setting up everything I needed to do business in mid-September and started buying products in October. My first products went live on November 12.

How I went from 0 to $7375 in 60 Days with Amazon FBA

Since I outsource some of my most time-consuming tasks and use online tools to analyze my purchases, I’m able to make informed buying decisions. This allows me to focus on selecting the right products to purchase and sell. Giving me more free time to source more products without ever having to leave my desk. Better yet, I can do it from anywhere in the world and it allows for me to do the traveling I’ve always wanted to do. The only requirements are a good internet connection, a laptop, and some capital to fund your business. Having a bit of passion and persistence can’t hurt either. It helps to have some sort of routine so you can stay motivated.

It’s been an amazing journey and I wanted to share my results. I’ve met a lot of people that talk about starting an FBA business. They usually try and jump into the most advanced method that requires a lot of capital, marketing, and an international supplier or manufacturer. Not to mention way too much risk for someone just starting out in e-commerce. To be fair, I’ve had 15 years experience in logistics, supply chain, and e-commerce combined, so my learning curve was not as long. However, the process was easy enough that anyone who remains consistent and is willing to put in the time to educate themselves can have success. Here are my results from my first two months:

November Amazon Sales Figures (Month 1)

December Amazon Sales Figures (Month 2)

Amazon Sales Figures From First 60 Days

Revenue VS. Profit Margin

One thing to take note here is that even though these numbers look great, your profit margin in an Amazon FBA Business is around 20-30% on average. A lot of sellers out there will try and beef up their numbers and not tell you the whole story. My profit margin was 26.9% during this timeframe. This gave me a net profit of around $1985.

You’ll notice that I’ve nearly doubled my sales in my second month. It’s pretty simple to scale once you’ve got a system down. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of difficulties with operating an Amazon FBA Business. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, but with motivation, dedication, education, and a little guidance you can be well on your way to building something of substantial value over the long-term. Just ask the guys in the FBA Sourcing Simplifiers Facebook group, a lot of them do over 6 figures a month in sales revenue. Yes, that’s right, per month!

What’s Next?

Now that I have a handle on the sourcing process as well as the shipments into the FBA warehouses via my consolidator, I have a few things I want to get accomplished. I’m implementing an inventory management tool mostly for listing and accounting purposes. Incorporating this tool will give me more precise data so I can have a better understanding of my business. I will also start using an automatic repricing tool. This will help my inventory move faster and hopefully increase my sales. It doesn’t hurt that it gives me one less thing I need to do on a regular basis. I have future plans to outsource the product analysis part of my business so I can focus more on bringing in new products and scaling the business. For now, I have a goal to increase my revenue by 20% this month, let’s see what happens.

What do you think, is this a feasible business model that you might be able to do? Do you think it’s possible to sustain in the long-term while traveling? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts, I’m always interested in valuable feedback. Leave a comment below!

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